Chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA) is one of two primary bile acids in human beings and facilitates lipid digestion. The pharmaceutical industry can use CDCA for therapeutic purposes including preventative care and treatments for gallstone disorders, cerebrotendineous xanthomatosis, liver disease, heart disease, and potentially even Hepatitis C. Another use of CDCA is the production of Ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), a secondary bile acid. UDCA has significant pharmaceutical importance for its uses relating to obesity, primary biliary cirrhosis, cystic fibrosis, and a number of other conditions.
CDCA can be synthesized, as shown in CN102060902A (“Chenodeoxycholic acid synthesis method”). Synthesis requires extraction and/or production of costly ingredients, along with intensive labor and time.
CDCA is naturally occurring not just in human beings, but in some animals including chickens and geese as well, providing a readily available source for CDCA. Some of these animals are used in the poultry industry, such as chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. Extraction of bile from chickens can yield 1.8-3.0 mL of bile per gall bladder. Individual poultry plants process upwards of 165,000 birds each shift, which could provide 200 or more liters of CDCA each shift. This represents a significant potential source of CDCA and could provide more CDCA for the pharmaceutical industry to treat more patients who need it.
Unfortunately, the extraction processes for obtaining the bile from these gall bladders is time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive. One exemplary method of the current processes is described in CN1850846B (“Production method for extracting chenodeoxycholic acid using chicken gall”). This process includes cutting and freezing chicken into thin slices, cooking the slices, and various other labor-intensive steps.
These highly labor intensive and inefficient processes are not currently compatible with the poultry industry. Poultry processing is highly automated and fast moving, using evisceration lines to prepare the birds. Evisceration lines at poultry processing plants can process 140 or more birds each minute as part of a finely tuned system. The inefficiency of these current CDCA processes makes integration into the evisceration lines infeasible as they would burden the preparation process significantly and vastly diminish the production volume.